Gendering Famine: Women and Economy in Bengal

In representations of the Bengal famine of 1943, the specter of a "ruined womanhood" has been a persistent and much repeated trope. Because of a booming sex-trade in wartime Calcutta (the main staging point for the Allied effort against Japan), and the reality (and rumor) of Bengali women surviving famine by recourse to prostitution; women's survival during famine, and women's emergence during this time as independent economic agents, became associated with a tint of shame and moral failure. Moreover, in Bengal, as elsewhere, the typical media depiction of famine was most often a gendered one: an anonymous woman's emaciated face stares dully into a waiting camera lens, her rail thin arm supports a wasted infant who seeks vainly for sustenance from a sunken, withered breast - it is a barren picture of utter hopelessness. It can be argued, however, that the Bengal famine is not so easily typified by stock images of the abject suffering and sexual victimization. In fact, records indicate that during famine, woman had a better chance of survival than men. This is not entirely surprising. In analyzing the longer trajectory of  women's entitlement to food commodities in Bengal, we find that women had  to navigate huger and dearth domestically for many generations before famine, and as such were perhaps more prepared for survival than were men . A study of women's survival during famine , moreover, charts a complex story of innovative, and gendered, mobilizations around food entitlements and novel enactments of, again, gendered, economic agency not limited to the sex-trade. In demystifying women's survival during the 1943 famine, it is also possible, conversely, to trace the mechanisms of a prevailing patriarchy which sought to re-inscribe women as exploited victims in need of protection, while stigmatizing women's economic activity (for years to come) as morally suspect.